


more than friends, not quite lovers

by cupsofstardust



Series: new and improved mystic messenger [2]
Category: Mystic Messenger (Video Game)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Extended Scene, F/M, Fluff and Angst, MC has a sister, Ok bye, She/her pronouns, also, also mc has Family Issues, and also Strong Feelings, cheritz has never heard of those, enjoy lol, haha in this mc has a family, idk how to tag, kinda angsty??, lookin at u cheritz, mc yells at seven, oh wait also, since thats what im good at apparently, spoilers for sevens route obviously, takes place on day 8 of sevens route, the outgoing cockroach phone call :)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-22
Updated: 2018-11-22
Packaged: 2019-08-26 21:37:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16689331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cupsofstardust/pseuds/cupsofstardust
Summary: She was never just a friend. From the moment she entered the RFA chatroom, from the moment he did his first preliminary search on her, from the moment he saw her smiling in her profile picture on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, she could never be just a friend.(title changed)





	more than friends, not quite lovers

**Author's Note:**

> mc is just really stressed out, you know?

A week of flirting. For what? For Seven to ignore her once they're finally together? Of all the ways she imagined their first meeting going, it was _not_ this. It was never this.

But, she guesses, nothing is ever average with Seven. It's one of his charms, and one of the reasons she was drawn to him from the beginning.

The clacking of his keyboard has become almost unbearable, a constant droning; the sound drills into every corner of her mind. She has to stop him, just for a moment. She opens up the RFA app, clicking through to her contacts. She finds Seven's name and, before she can change her mind, dials his number. She knows he'll probably just yell at her for bothering him but honestly, as long as there's any noise _other_ than that goddamn keyboard she'll be happy.

It rings a few times before he picks up. Judging by how quickly he does it, he doesn't check caller ID. He must assume it's V to pick up that quickly. He continues typing with one hand. Once she says a quiet "Hello," however, the typing stops altogether.

He sighs. Loudly. He cards a hand through his hair and slumps back in his chair. Without turning around, he scolds her. "Again? You don't give up, do you?"

A moment of tense silence before her response. "Then don't pick up." And maybe, _maybe,_ it comes out a little harsher than she intended but hey, she has the right to be a little irate. She doesn't like the feeling, but she has to admit it's justified.

"I didn't want to... Damn it. Next time, I won't. I'll turn back first and if I can't see you then I'll pick up." He pauses and she grins, thinking up a situation in which she calls him from a different room in the house where he can't see her, since that's the criteria required for him to answer her calls. But he continues, startling her out of her daydream. "So tell me. What's going on? The system looks fine...." He clicks a few keys as if checking to make sure he's right.

As she's formulating a viable reason for the call, a dark brown dot skitters over the floor. In one movement, she's off the couch, putting as much distance as she can between her and the bug. Seven turns around to see what the excitement is about, confusion evident on his face.

She points to the living room with a shaking finger. "Oh my God! Cockroach!!"

He jumps out of his seat instantly, head swinging towards the offending insect. "Cockroach? Pesticide!" he yells, and if it were any other situation she'd laugh at his quick reaction. "Don't you have any pesticide? No, I'll go!" He's at the closet before she can blink and back in the living room just as quickly, looking around for the bug. "How the hell did it come in? I'll spray enough pesticide for it to die so don't worry. Just wait a bit." 

And even though it's just a silly cockroach, and even though she hates herself for it, a few tears slip down her cheeks. It's dumb to cry because of a cockroach, but here she is, standing in the kitchen with trembling knees and salty tears filling her eyes. It's just a cockroach, she berates herself. 

But is it, really?

It's amazing she held out this long without having a breakdown. She imagines it's because she knew Seven was keeping an eye on the CCTV and she didn't want to worry him with that. She knew it would happen sometime, but she had hoped it would be later rather than sooner. And she'd hoped it wouldn't be in front of Seven.

After a hefty amount of pesticide sprayed both directly on the cockroach and in every corner of the apartment, he sighs. "Alright... Everything's good...." As he turns around, he sees her and his face falls instantly, worry filling those beautiful golden eyes. "Huh? You-you're crying? Why!? It's just... It's just a cockroach! It'll be dead soon, p-please stop crying." 

She sniffles, nearly laughing at him for worrying, for thinking she's only upset about a bug. "I'm not crying about the cockroach, Seven," she says, her voice breaking and trembling around every word, "It's everything _but_ the cockroach!" She takes a shaky breath, wiping at her eyes with the heel of her palm before continuing. "It's b-being texted by a stranger and wanting to help him only to find out a-all he wanted to do was hurt me. It's being responsible for a p-party that I know virtually nothing about and only have a week to prepare for it; it's living in this _fucking_ apartment with a _b-bomb_ for a _week and a half_ ; it's almost getting k-kidnapped and then almost blown up in the same day. It's missing my-my bed, and my house, and my sister, and my _family!"_

He's taken aback, mouth open as he struggles for an answer. He's... He's never seen her this distraught. What... How does he fix this?

"A-And it's _you_ , Seven! Despite this awful fucking situation I met _you_ , and talking with you was w-worth all the other stuff. But now you...." She stops suddenly, wiping her face with the back of her hand. "N-Now you...." She can't compose herself enough to finish, and she drops to her knees on the floor, her free arm pressed against her chest as though she's clasping a teddy bear. 

Her phone falls to the floor and she wraps both arms around herself, her loud sobbing reduced to quiet whimpers and shaky exhales. She's a pitiful sight, her skirt pooling around her knees, hunched over and hugging herself for comfort because he can't bring himself to do it instead. Why? Is he such a coward that he can't comfort a crying girl? Is he so cold-hearted that he won't help a friend? 

...Is she just a friend?

"Now you won't even look at me," she finally whispers. 

And his heart cracks in half.

"You won't talk to me, and you won't let me talk to you, or even _look_ at you. I'm closer to you than ever but you've never been further away."

And that's when he knows. She was never just a friend. From the moment she entered the RFA chatroom, from the moment he did his first preliminary search on her, from the moment he saw her smiling in her profile picture on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, she could never be just a friend. Not to him. 

He slowly crouches next to her, taking his glasses off to rub his eyes tiredly. His phone is still pressed to his ear and he sighs into it, the sound echoing through her phone on the floor. 

"I'm just busy working," he says finally, replacing his glasses and looking at her. "So if you want to say something, say it." When she doesn't answer, he says, "God... Don't cry. What should I do?" He inhales shakily. "I... Stop crying. Please." At this point, it's almost like he's begging her to stop. 

But she can't. It's like a dam has broken inside her and every negative emotion she's felt over the past eight days is rushing out of her like Niagara Falls. She's tried so hard to keep it together for the RFA, her friends. She can't believe she broke like this, in front of Seven of all people. She thought she was stronger than this.

She needs him to do something. She needs... She needs her Seven back. She's so in love with him and she's afraid to tell him just how much, because if this is how he treats her after she told him yesterday who knows what would happen if he found out how deep her feelings run. She's never felt this way before, and she's so desperately afraid to lose him.

"C-Can't you hold my hand?" she says, her voice barely a whisper. She holds her hand out. "I-It's shaking."

He eyes her proffered hand with surprise, then apprehension. It really is shaking a lot. "Can I... really hold your hand?"

Instead of answering, she quietly reaches out and takes Seven's free hand in her own. Her chest tightens when she finds that his hand dwarfs hers. His fingers are warm when he wraps them around hers. 

He doesn't say anything for a while, and then: "Your hands are so small..."

His blunt statement startles a laugh out of her, which turns into a hiccup.

"Oh... I'm not doing anything weird," he amends quickly, not looking at her. "I just... want to comfort you." Suddenly, he's standing up, pulling her with him. He's... quite strong, isn't he? She feels like a doll in his grasp. He takes a chair from the tiny kitchen table and places it behind his, so they're back to back. "Here. Sit here." It's then that she notices how close they are. He's standing a hair's breadth away from her, his hand still in hers; he smells nice, like honey and... chocolate? As if he's noticing the same thing she is, he pulls away and says, "It's weird to be on the phone when we're this close. I'll hang up now."

He does so, absently placing his phone on the desk behind her. He runs a nervous hand through his hair, as though debating his next move.

"Why do I have to sit behind you?" she asks, her tears subsiding finally. Her face feels stiff as the tear tracks dry down.

"I can't," he answers. "I can't have you asking me what I'm doing, I need to focus. This is important, for you and for Saeran."

She considers this. "What if I promise to be quiet?"

"You? Quiet?" he snorts derisively. "Uh, I mean..." He tries to backtrack when he sees her lip tremble slightly. 

She looks down at her hands in her lap, wringing them together so she doesn't have to look at him. 

"I... So, you have a sister?" he asks, desperately trying to change the subject just to see her smile again. He needs her to smile.

"I thought you already knew that?" she replies. "Didn't you research me before I joined?"

Seven shakes his head quickly. "No! I just... I didn't... I didn't know you had a sister. I don't know anything about your family, just you."

She frowns, her bottom lip puffing out. "Hm. That seems counterintuitive, to do research on a person but not their family."

He scratches the back of his head. "Well, I guess I did some basic searching on your parents. Only to make sure they weren't part of the government or investigators or anything," he clarifies. "But other than that, I know nothing."

"Oh," she murmurs. Then, "Yeah, I have a sister." She doesn't elaborate at all.

He wracks his brain for something to say to keep the conversation going, then sighs and returns to his seat instead. He can feel her behind him; he feels hot knowing she's right there. In the silence, the clacking of his keyboard sounds like gunshots.

"Why don't you tell me about her?"

_Oh._

"O-Okay... Well, she's three years younger than me, but she's _so_ smart, way smarter than me." She laughs. "She wants to go to college for... Robotics, was it? I don't know the details, I just know she's always making things and showing me her inventions every time I visit. My parents, well... my mom... tolerates it? Don't get me wrong, Mom loves that she has a clear goal in life..." She pauses, sighs, then continues in a quieter voice. "At least one of us does."

He knows he shouldn't take interest, but he's already invested in the story of her family. "Robotics, huh? That's... ambitious."

She laughs again. "She can handle it. She's a genius." After another pause, she says, "I think you'd like her. You two would get along like a house on fire."

Without his consent, a soft smile curves his mouth upwards. He's just thankful she can't see it. Does she really want him to meet her family? "Oh yeah?"

"Yeah," she says wistfully. "She knows way more about technology than I do."

There's a long silence, filled with the sounds of rapid typing. He doesn't know what else to ask, but he wants to keep her talking.

"Do you have lots of family?" 

She doesn't answer for a while, then she takes a breath and rests her head against the back of her chair. "No, it's just me, my mom, and my sister."

But he saw her dad online, he researched him... It wasn't that long ago, surely he hadn't died in the week since then, right?

"What about-"

"My dad?" she asks before he can finish. He notices her voice has taken on a bitter tone and he regrets asking almost immediately. "He's not my family." She says it with an air of finality, like she wants to be done talking about it, but he's still curious.

"What happened? If you don't mind telling me, that is," he questions. He doesn't want her to be uncomfortable but she's so intriguing to him. He wants to know everything about her.

"He cheated on my mom," she says simply. "Two? Maybe it was two years ago, I don't really remember. But yeah, he cheated on her, then asked for a separation, then a divorce, all within the span of six months." She stops, as if debating how much she should tell him, and he doesn't say anything. He doesn't want to startle her enough to make her stop. "And then he moved away without telling us to live with his girlfriend before the divorce was final." 

He stops typing suddenly. The screen is making his eyes ache, and her words are making his chest ache. He didn't know... He thought... When he doesn't start typing again, she asks, "Are you okay Seven? Do you need something to eat?"

"N-No, I'm fine," he manages. "I just need a small break, is all. Don't worry about me."

"Okay." Her voice is small. "My sister.... If you asked my sister, she'd have a bunch of other stories to tell about him. Since she still talked to him after he left. I..."

"You...?" he whispers, turning his head to look at her. 

"Well, this is another story, but... He took me out for dinner - my sister was supposed to come too, but she was sick - and... and I was by myself when he told me he was going to ask for a divorce. And I couldn't..."

He's listening so intently that he hears the slight hitch in her breath, but she doesn't start crying. She's dwelled on this for far too long to still be that upset by it.

"I just wanted to leave after that. I don't think I said anything to him on the ride back to my mom's house, and when I got there I just went to my bedroom. My mom wanted to know how it went but... How could I tell her?"

Yet another pause.

"I haven't spoken to him since he left."

She stops for a long time and he's pretty sure she's done. His suspicions are confirmed when she sighs and pulls her knees up to her chest. 

"I'm sorry," he murmurs. "I didn't know..."

"It's fine," she says, waving a hand. "Not many people do. I don't like talking about it."

"I can see why, your dad's a dick," Seven says, much louder than he meant to. His tone startles a laugh from her, and once she starts she can't stop. Eventually, he joins in and their laughter is the best replacement for his keyboard.

"Thanks, Seven," she says, "For listening to me."

He smiles and rests his hands on the keyboard. "Thank you for telling me."

Then, a content silence, broken only by the sounds of typing, reigns once more while Seven resumes his work. This time, the keyboard doesn't annoy her as much as it did before, and she doesn't have to wonder what's changed.


End file.
